


Some Assembly Required

by simplyprologue



Series: Careful the Tale You Tell (Children Will Listen) [7]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Charlotte Fic, Christmas, F/M, Fluff, Parenthood, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:08:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I think this year is our dress rehearsal and I really don’t wanna screw it up.</i> Late into the night (or very early in the morning) Will and Mac are trying to get ready for Charlotte's first Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Assembly Required

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Given the content of my Secret Santa fic (which you will all be reading in the upcoming hours) I figured I should write some saccharine nonsense. Besides, today is the McBaby's first Christmas provided they weren't born a month-plus early. I hope that all of you who celebrate are having a good holiday.

She carried the baby for nine months, through morning sickness and back pain and heartburn and then at the end of all that, had to push an eight pound infant out of her body. Which means that Will can do all the intensive gift assembly, since Santa Claus just doesn’t deliver miniature scale play houses in _pieces._ At least not to _their_ daughter.

According to Will, anyway.

“Does this one play music?”

“Yes.”

Their couch is incredibly comfortable, she thinks, watching Will on his hands and knees in front of their Christmas tree, trying to coax together the fiddly bits of some Fisher Price torture device. It was _supposed_ to have happened last weekend, but then Obama surprised them all by deciding to renew normal relations with Cuba and then any idea of them _not_ putting this off until after putting Charlotte to bed got briefly and succinctly shot to hell.

“Oh god,” Will mutters.

Swirling the eggnog contemplatively in her glass, she raises a single eyebrow. “Why?”

He snorts, sitting back on his haunches, gesturing towards his forehead with a screwdriver. “More songs to be eternally burned into my prefrontal cortex.”

“Parents make sacrifices for their children,” she answers into her glass, taking another large sip, thanking God and Jesus and quite possibly Santa and all his elves for Charlotte’s new and definite predilection for a diet consisting solely of solid foods.

Sacrifices, like eighteen months without a drop of liquor.

Although she’ll probably (read: definitely, but she’s trying not to be maudlin on Christmas) miss having her daughter at her breast and Will looking besottedly at her as she breastfeeds, among other things. But it in no way is indicative of her wanting a second child.

Definitely not.

(It’s more indicative of how much brandy she poured into the eggnog as she and Sloan were making it.)

“Is the voice high-pitched?” he asks.

(Most likely.)

“How would I know?”

“You bought it for her.”

She wriggles her red-painted toes where they rest on the coffee table. “You were there, Billy.”

“It was Macy’s, the week before Christmas. I was little more worried about making sure you didn’t get bludgeoned by some crazy person trying to fight their way to a register with a set of steak knives.”

“I was more impressed by the rioting in Islamabad,” she deadpans, directing him to get back to work.

Will balks. “You were _stabbed_ in Islamabad.”

“Those steak knives would have been in very impressive packaging. No hazard of being stabbed.”

Another large swallow of eggnog, and her head is pleasantly light. And another more minutes of creative cursing, and then her personal Santa finishes with the playhouse. Flipping the on-switch, Will trips the sensor for one of the songs.

“Motherfucker--”

And promptly turns it back off, scowling.

“The exersaucer is next,” she says, pointing to the large cardboard box from Evenflo.

“Doesn’t she already have one?”

“This one is for my office.”

Will laughs, picking up the box knife and ripping through the packing tape. It’s her latest fuck you to Pruitt (who, for some reason, is getting increasingly offended anytime Mac implies that it’s possible for her to be the mother of a small child _and_ run ACN at the same time, so all the more baby things to clutter up her office with the better) and they both know it.

“This one has a television screen with a Wi-Fi connection,” he muses, trying to sound like the model she chose isn’t entirely ridiculous.

But he knows that a spiteful MacKenzie is not a MacKenzie who should be equipped with a black American Express card.

“You’re the one who says our daughter should have the best available, Mr. Spent-Two-Thousand-Dollars-On-An-Indoor-Playground-Set,” she retorts. “She’s just walking, she’s not going to be scaling reproduction rock walls any time soon.”

“We don’t have a backyard, it’s the least I could do,” he shoots back idly, cutting through plastic wrapping and more tape, trying to yank the parts out. “And _that_ came with, you know, trained people to assemble it _for_ us.”

“It’s her first Christmas. She’s not going to remember it,” Mac protests, glancing briefly into her emptied glass, putting it down onto the table, and sliding gracelessly down to the floor.

(She feels absolutely fantastic, honestly, if not a bit tired. But still, fantastic. Their baby took her first steps last week in the office of the man she was named after, Pruitt has lost every battle this news cycle, and she doesn’t have to go into work for a _four whole days_. And now she’s sitting in her well-decorated living room, in her pajamas, with her husband.

It’s been a hell of a year.

Things have gone _well_ and she’s stopped being terrified that some force of the universe is going to take it all away from her.)

“ _I’m_ going to remember it,” he says, trying to blow a flop of blonde hair back into place. “Charlotte is _not_ going to--”

“Be resting in a lowly manger?” she jokes, making herself laugh as she crawls over to him. “I think we already debunked that one with the crib we decided on. And if you buy her any animals I’m making you sleep with _them,_ instead of with me in our bed.”

“I should have thought of that. I wouldn’t have to assemble a farm animal.”

Exhaling loudly, he sits back from the half-assembled toy.

“Do you want to take a break?” she asks, reaching up to neaten his hair.

“You’re already half in my lap, so I think you’ve answered that one yourself, hon.”

That she is, and promptly decides to put herself _entirely_ in his lap by straddling him and propping her arms atop his broad shoulders.

“It’s one in the morning,” Mac says, and bites her lip at him.

“So?”

Wrapping his arms around her waist, he pulls her closer until her breasts push up against his chest. She can tell the exact moment Will discovers she's abandoned her bra, his pupils contracting as her nipples harden at the pressure from being hugged to him.

“So we have all night…” she says lowly, laughing breathlessly.

He smiles. “Yes.”

All night, and then a baby who will wake up before seven o’clock chattering away on the monitor for her breakfast. Who cares if they’re sleep-deprived, if they’re so incandescently happy?

(Or so has been their motto since Charlie’s funeral last June, and especially since Charlotte was born in January.

They keep catching the other staring and grinning, like w _ho could have imagined_ , even as little as two years ago?)

Ducking her head, she kisses her way from his neck up to his ear as she slides one of her hands down his chest. “And last Christmas I was in absolutely no condition to be on my back on the floor next to the tree, whereas this year--”

Will retaliates by pulling aside the neckline of her pajama top and pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the juncture of her shoulder and her throat, scraping his teeth along the sensitive tendon before soothing it with his tongue and pulling back, wholly satisfied with her resultant moan.

“You have consumed enough eggnog to make you giggly and now you are very unsubtly in the process of getting your hand into my pants,” he murmurs as her fingers work at the drawstring of his sweatpants between them. “Not that I am, you know, complaining.”

“I’m just saying, I’m not pregnant, I’m not breastfeeding anymore. There are a lot of things back on the table.”

“Or on the floor.”

To prove the point, he clears the boxes and rolls of wrapping paper out of the way to lay her down on their plush, baby-friendly rug.

“Exactly.”

Her fingers tighten into the front of his t-shirt, pulling him down to lay on top of her.

(But more importantly, between her legs.)

“Okay, just a short break,” he concedes when her toes catch on the waistband of his pants and start pushing them down his legs.

Blinking up at him, she curls her hand around the back of his neck and pulls him down for a kiss. And then doesn’t stop kissing him, partially because it makes the light warm feeling in her head grow even more light and warm but mostly because Will’s tongue slides between her lips at the precise moment he slides a hand up the front of her shirt, tweaking a nipple between his fingers.

(And god if she didn’t miss _that,_ but having Charlotte breastfeeding and Will touching her breasts causing the same exact biological reaction caused some mixed messages she would rather remain unmixed, and thus a moratorium was placed.

But now--)

His hands next go to the buttons of her pajama top, plucking them apart.

She remembers that she intended to say something.

“She’s not even one yet, Will,” she says very determinedly when their mouths break apart.

He dons the same expression that he’s worn ever since she told him she was pregnant, and while she loves him for all that he’s sworn to give her and Charlotte everything his own father took away from him and his mother and his brother and his sisters, she wishes that he’d stop getting anxious over every little imperfect thing.

Charlotte doesn’t even know what Christmas is. All she’ll know in a few hours is that Mummy and Daddy will pluck her out of her crib and feed her big girl food and she’ll open a big haul of new toys to play with. That they’ll put her in the outfit Grandma Leona bought her after she wakes up from her morning nap, and when she’s brought out from her bedroom she’ll get to demonstrate her wobbly steps to all her aunties and uncles from ACN and eat too many desserts to appease the sweet tooth she inherited from Daddy.

They’ll have a lot of time to get it right, make it better.

“I know,” he says, and nips at her lower lip when she draws it between her teeth. “But I think this year is our dress rehearsal and I really don’t wanna screw it up.”

“We’re not going to,” she tries to reassure him.

“You sure?”

“I mean, worse comes to worse I think she’ll be pretty happy to play in the boxes her toys came in,” she teases, trailing her hands up and down his back. “Babies do that.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Humming, she rolls her head to face the large pile of loosely-wrapped boxes and ribbon-tied bags and half-assembled exersaucer.

“Are you sure you don’t want help?”

Will takes advantage of her bared neck, licking a stripe up her jugular. “I thought the deal was you assembled the baby, I assemble everything else.”

Squirming as pressure builds between her thighs (and pressure building between _his_ , which she can feel firmly pushed against her hip) she hooks her legs up around his waist after finally finishing getting his sweatpants down around his calves.

“I’m flexible.”

His hands reach back to trace the sensitive skin behind her knees.

“You definitely are.”

"Also I'd like to go to bed before six in the morning."

Rolling his eyes, Will decides to concede the point (or so MacKenzie tells herself, although it’s the holiday and the two of them have plenty of time for debate in the upcoming days) kissing her again.

Above them in the Christmas tree twinkles in the dim light, and all in the tiny little snow globe world of their living room is merry and bright.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
